Since the launch of Opera 10.5 in March 2010, I've been using it as my primary browser, whether at work or at home.
Using Ubuntu at work, and a Windows netbook at home, I wanted a fast browser for my netbook and a coherent browsing experience on both operating systems. And this is where Opera 10.5 (and newer) fits perfectly.

It is a browser, not a text-to-speech, which is a browser feature. Making the browser inoperative for a lack of feature is a bit... extreme :/

Fine then, take the feature out and be done with it. But don't ship with it completely broken, and then ignore users who ask about it. I mean, if you right click in the browser with text highlighted and hit 'speak', it'll offer to download the voice files for you, but fails every time. I'd say this was an epic fail on Opera's part.

Fine then, take the feature out and be done with it. But don't ship with it completely broken, and then ignore users who ask about it.

You are ignoring another aspect here... IBM. Opera's voice system is subject to IBM's license terms.

And knowing IBM, they probably have a gag order on Opera as well, so they couldn't do anything about it, and they couldn't talk about it either. If they did, they would be in breach of contract, and sued.